NBC CEO Admits Big Media Is Losing Piracy Battle, Fails To See Industry’s Own Errors

When NBC’s CEO Jeff Zucker took time Wednesday to stand atop his company’s soapbox, he said something quite true: that copyright owners are in fact “losing the battle” against the world’s digital pirates.

What he failed to follow his statement up with, however, is that it’s really no use fighting the copyright violators (which, I might add, he said most certainly should be done, and perhaps exponentially more forcefully), and that it’d be far more effective and financially beneficial for copyright owners to slice a great many inches off the massive wall Big Media has erected around itself and see to it that it gives consumers what they want: fair prices.

Consumers know full well that they’ve been gouged to no end by the members of the RIAA and MPAA and whatever other front group media industry behemoths have chosen to stand stubbornly behind. They know that whether they’re purchasing physical CDs and DVDs or their wholly digital equivalents made available to the world’s netizens by various Web-based outlets, they’re needlessly paying too much for those products. Whether it be an album shipped in a cardboard case from Amazon or a collection of audio files from the iTunes Music Store, the consumer is paying more than he/she should rightfully pay.

Thus widespread piracy exists. There isn’t an overwhelming threat to content owners, which those corporations need combat only with a barrage of lawsuits ‘til the “underground” ceases to exist. The vast majority of such illicit activity is done by the everyman, who took the cue of a technically brilliant few, and who sees it as quite alright to purchase something legitimately for an unreasonable premium and download another item freely from a peer-to-peer network to “balance the transaction.”

There isn’t anything inherently evil about the consumer. Instead, piracy practiced among the general population is more an equalizer than anything else. It’s a very active movement that’s given every hint possible to the people putting out films and albums year in and year out that they’re not getting treated as they should, and that as long as they continue to be told to pay too much for something they know quite well isn’t worth the attached value, the free-for-all will persist. The message is quite clear really: bring the prices down, and piracy will more or less go back to being a minor nuisance, something that the vast majority of consumers will pay absolutely no attention to, just as they did in decades past.

The financial hit the music and film industries have taken as a result of piracy is large, but the blame for those diminished quarterly results rests squarely with them. Their actions alone have led to the souring of the content provider-consumer relationship, and now that the consumer has the upper hand, it certainly will not relinquish its power, just as Big Media for many years chose to make as grand a killing as it could at the consumer’s expense.

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